And then the scene changed to a June evening in his own countryside.  He was deep in the very heart of the hills beside a little loch, whose clear waves lapped on beaches of milky sand, it was just on twilight, and an infinite sighing of soft winds was around him, a far-away ineffable brightness of sunset, and the good scents of dusk among thyme and heather.  He had fished all the afternoon, and his catch lay on the bent beside him.  He was to sleep the night in his plaid, and already a fire of heather-roots behind him was prepared for supper.  He had been for a swim, and his hair was still wet on his forehead.  Just across a conical hill rose into the golden air, the highest hill in all the countryside, but here but a little thing, for the loch was as high as many a hill-top.  Just on its face was a scaur, and there a raven—­a speck—­was wheeling slowly.  Among the little islands broods of mallard were swimming, and trout in a bay were splashing with wide circles.  The whole place had seemed caught up into an ecstasy, a riot of gold and crimson and far-off haunting shades and scents and voices.  And yet it was no wild spectacle; it was the delicate comfort of it all which had charmed him.  Life seemed one glorious holiday, the world a garden of the gods.  There was his home across the hills, with its cool chambers, its books and pictures, its gardens and memories.  There were his friends up and down the earth.  There was the earth itself waiting for his conquest.  And, meantime, there was this airy land around him, his own by the earliest form of occupation.

The fire died down to embers and a sudden scattering of ashes woke him out of his dreaming.  The old Scots land was many thousand miles away.  His past was wiped out behind him.  He was alone in a very strange place, cut off by a great gulf from youth and home and pleasure.  For an instant the extreme loneliness of an exile’s death smote him, but the next second he comforted himself.  The heritage of his land and his people was his in this ultimate moment a hundredfold more than ever.  The sounding tale of his people’s wars—­one against a host, a foray in the mist, a last stand among the mountain snows—­sang in his heart like a tune.  The fierce, northern exultation, which glories in hardships and the forlorn, came upon him with such keenness and delight that, as he looked into the night and the black unknown, he felt the joy of a greater kinship.  He was kin to men lordlier than himself, the true-hearted who had ridden the King’s path and trampled a little world under foot.  To the old fighters in the Border wars, the religionists of the South, the Highland gentlemen of the Cause, he cried greeting over the abyss of time.  He had lost no inch of his inheritance.  Where, indeed, was the true Scotland?  Not in the little barren acres he had left, the few thousands of city-folk, or the contentions of unlovely creeds and vain philosophies.  The elect of his race had ever been the wanderers.  No more than Hellas had his land a paltry local unity.  Wherever the English flag was planted anew, wherever men did their duty faithfully and without hope of little reward—­there was the fatherland of the true patriot.